Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 25, 2013 @09:48AM
from the 'cause-that's-how-they-roll-or-rather-don't dept.

Barence writes "Ubuntu has shelved the idea of moving to rolling releases, and will continue to release a new version every six months. Earlier this year, Ubuntu developers discussed the idea of moving to rolling releases, with new features added to the OS as and when they were ready. However, In an interview with PC Pro, Canonical CEO Jane Silber said the developers had taken a 'cold, hard look at our long-standing practices' and decided to stay with twice-yearly releases. It has, however, cut support on non-LTS releases from 18 to nine months." Today, the Ubuntu team have released the latest iteration of Ubuntu, 13.04 ("Raring Ringtail"), along with variants like Kubuntu 13.04.

All of the above will get you nearly the same hardware support and often a better desktop experience. Manjaro is an up and comer based on Arch, still has some bugs. Sabayon, based on Gentoo is actually pretty damn good now. The others have been great for a while. I honestly don't understand why people are so hung up on Ubuntu, it doesn't offer anything the other distros don't.

Good reason to skip this (13.04) version: It forces your hand on 13.10.
I.e. you'll have to upgrade to 13.10 after that no matter what. And if, god forbid, you'll have a hardware compatibility problem in 13.10 - you'll be screwed.

On another hand, if you're on on 12.10 now - you have the option to what till 14.04

The Arch wiki includes a long list of bugs related to Steam games and most of them are not present on Ubuntu. Valve tests on Ubuntu and they don't give a shit about bugs and library issues caused by running unsupported distributions.